If you’re the average person, you don’t have time for paid monitoring tools; and furthermore, you really don’t want to mess with complicated social media monitoring tools or setup either. So what do you do if you want to monitor your space, your company, your name and your competition?

You check out these 7 easy tools with even easier setups.

With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted.

1) Meet. Google Replay. To check out this feature, do the following:

Go to the Google homepage, click on the show options link, and then click on updates. Make sure you have already typed in a search term and then see what happens. A waterfall of real time data coming from Twitter. Time elapsed: 30 seconds

2) Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Time to set up: 5 minutes

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

monitoring a developing news story

keeping current on a competitor or industry

getting the latest on an event

keeping tabs on your local news or teams

3) Monitter is so simple its scary, just plug in words or terms in each of the three columns and go watch the firehose of data coming from Twitter. Time to set up: 1 minute

4) I’ll add Social Mention, though sometimes the results are a bit odd, but the setup might take one minute, which is what we’re talking about here. Time to set up: 2 minutes

5) and 6) The next 2 are great for seeing where someone might have a social profile setup. Knowem and Usernamecheck are both solid. Set up time: 7 minutes

7) Backtype takes about 30 seconds and allows you to monitor stuff. Time to set up: 30 seconds

It’s wednesday April 20th 2008, so I think it’s important that we keep it light, interesting and still add a bit of tech stuff in todays post. First off lets go here:The world’s most famous colossal squid was still thawing yesterday in a New Zealand museum laboratory as researchers prepared to measure it, probe its interior, and take samples. It has a huge eye.

How can they have the contestants singing songs we haven’t heard… ever? Or better yet, songs our parents barely remember? And they wonder why the ratings are starting to slip. Perhaps we’ll look back on Neil Diamond night as the night the show “jumped the shark”.

For the uninitiated, the term jump the shark refers to when a tv show tops out in popularity and starts to fade in to Bolivian-as Mike Tyson once said.. The origin of the term comes from an old episode of Happy Days, where Fonzie decides to try and jump over a shark on a pair of water skis…nuff said.

On Monday night I caught the intro to Deal or No Deal where they had Storm Troopers as brief case holders, Darth Vader as the banker and Chewy as a cheerleader…Can you say JUMP The Shark?

This just in: If you’re young and have zero cash, then you probably use Yahoo more, and if you are rich and older, then you use Google! Say what? According to Hitwise the stats bear this out, check the matrix.

According to Uptrends, there are some social networks out there that need to get their act together. This is in reference to the amount of time certain social networks were down, as in “Page not found”. Not a good idea to be anti-social when your business model is..ah hem a SOCIAL NETWORK. Two of the biggest offenders were BlackPLanet.com and Reunion.com. BlackPlanet was down for a total of almost 21 hours in the past 30 days and Reunion.com, almost 13 hours. Uptrends, is one of the leading remote website and server monitoring companies that tracks uptime of some of the most popular social networks.

My plan for optimizing some terms for the sake of SEO, specifically the term, direct response marketing, seems to have worked rather well. I’m not shouting it to the rooftops, just merely giving myself some props for having a plan, sticking to the plan and watching it work. Right On, Me! It was not an easy term, but it wasn’t like it was mortgage lenders either, but the results have been favorable.

On a sports note, The Spurs are still the champs until someone knocks them off, though the Lakers are really looking good. The Chris Paul gang out of New Orleans is a really good story this year, and I’m glad the Rockets are not laying down. Are the Mavs ready for an overhaul? The New York Times thinks so. Looks like the J kidd trade might not have worked out. But do you fire the coaches? Same holds true for the Suns and Shaq? It’s been fun to watch snippets of the games each and every night. Looks like we might see the Pistons advance as well as the Cavs. Am I the only that thinks the Wizards are turning into a bunch of punks? Don’t think I’m right? read this post by Mary Schmitt Boyer One last thing, the TNT announcers on all of these games have been fabulous! Major shout out to them.